To plant a garden
Before I became acclimated with sustainability, I thought it was analogous with environmentalism. My definition of the term was based on maintaining Earth’s physical resources and protecting its biological functions. However, since working at the Office, I’ve realized that sustainability is so much more. While addressing environmental issues is essential to living more sustainably, we must also consider the fact that these issues would not exist if our values lied elsewhere. In my eyes, sustainability seeks to reform and protect people, and favors a society driven by feelings and ideas, rather than things. It works towards achieving ideal concepts such as individual meaning and life purpose, self-fulfillment and sufficiency, the development of meaningful relationships and a sense of community.
I feel extremely fortunate to have been exposed to these things through the garden apprenticeship program here at the Office. Gardening embodies two seemingly opposite but both integral parts of sustainability: self-sufficiency (me) and community (we). Being able to provide for yourself by growing your own food is unbelievably empowering. It allows us to be independent of industrial agriculture and get reconnected with what we consume. While gardening can be personally fulfilling, it also provides a sense of belonging and interdependency among people. Instead of isolation, there’s the accumulated knowledge of fellow gardeners to draw on. The entire process is a teaching-learning experience where we grow with and from each other. It’s about teaching people to fish so that we can do so alongside each other, instead of just doing the fishing ourselves. Beyond that, the apprenticeship program has allowed me to form relationships that would have never spawned otherwise, and for that I am so grateful.
Gardening makes you feel grounded and connected to your food, as well as to the people around you. The process can be therapeutic and tranquil, and the results oh-so-satisfying. When you dissect the word agriculture, you find the prefix agri- (meaning field or related to the land) and the word culture (a way of life of a group of people and their behaviors, beliefs, and values). Agriculture literally means getting in touch with the Earth as well humanity, forming a holistic connectivity with everything around you.
The garden apprenticeship program has made me feel as though I am part of something larger than myself – a community. This natural result of gardening is also one of the ultimate goals of sustainability. Barrett Brown of the Integral Institute for Sustainability offers a definition that embodies these notions of self-sufficiency and community: “an alignment of the different levels of our individual and collective consciousness so that we can create, maintain, and healthily evolve.” Our path to a sustainable world will be accomplished by participating in actions that contribute towards self-reliance, a shared purpose, and the greater good. This is why I firmly believe that to plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow.
-Katie Kerbel
